Office 365 Layered Security Features are Key to Securing your Cloud Environment

It’s been almost two months since Microsoft’s Inspire event, and during that time we have been busy speaking with our clients about rethinking productivity. What have we been telling them? The technology stack is changing and that’s great news! Utilize it effectively and you can help your business reach its full potential with ease.
Three key areas of focus came to the fore at Inspire: collaboration, security and streamlining. We discussed collaboration a couple of week ago – here – and this week we are looking at how security can help you rethink productivity.
Security is a key element of your technology stack and one you must get right. Microsoft has invested significant resources into compliance as an addition to its existing security offerings, and Office365 now has increased security layers, meaning additional features, some of these features we have highlighted below:
Conditional Access – Defines ways you can control access to data from different end-user devices and applications.
Azure AD – A directory authentication service in Azure designed for companies migrating from on-prem servers, which means losing the ability to authenticate users. The key differentiator of Azure AD is that it is primarily an identity solution, designed for Internet-based users and applications using HTTP and HTTPS communications. There are other versions of Azure that offer more capabilities, but the base offering in Azure AD is limited.
Microsoft Threat Protection – Overall protection to increase enhanced security for end users, end points, user data, cloud apps and the Azure infrastructure.
Compliance – Provides access to the following to enable organizations to better meet their specific compliance and regulatory obligations:
- data loss prevention (DLP)
- data subject requests (DSRs)
- data governance
- sensitivity and retention labels and policies
- eDiscovery
- case management
- cloud app security
Microsoft Information Protection – Cloud-based solution enabling organizations to classify and protect documents and emails by applying labels in three different ways: Automatically by administrators who define rules and conditions; manually by users; or a combination of the two whereby users are given recommendations.
These features offer a snapshot of the security Office 365 offers. Microsoft has increased is overall security layers to help you secure your environment effectively and from every angle. And you must. Rethinking productivity is key; and security is the beginning, middle and end of this.
